The evidence has shown that the experimental subjects in Camp Ravensbrueck were not selected by the defendant Karl Gebhardt nor by any of the other defendants, but that the selection was made by the competent agency within the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin or the political department of the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. During the conference at the beginning of July 1942, in which the conditions for the experiments were agreed upon, it was expressly assured that the experimental subjects were persons sentenced to death who were to be pardoned if they survived the experiments. In view of the fact that the defendant Gebhardt did not himself select the experimental subjects and that, on the other hand, no complaints of any kind on the part of the experimental subjects were ever reported to him,—the defendant Fischer was not in a position to make any personal observations along these lines either—we now must examine the question of the legal position of the defendant Gebhardt if he erroneously assumed the consent of the experimental subjects. In criminal law it is a generally recognized principle that there can be no question of intentional action if there existed an erroneous assumption of justificatory facts. This principle can also be found in Article 59 of the German Penal Code.[13] But beyond that, this legal principle may be considered one of the principles which is generally valid and which is derived from the general principles of the criminal law of all civilized nations, thus representing an inherent part of our modern conception of criminal law. In application of this principle—and even if the Court does not consider the consent of the experimental subjects as proved and, therefore, does not provide the prerequisites for a legal excuse for objective reasons—we still cannot assume an intentional act on the part of the defendant Gebhardt if he acted under the “erroneous assumption of consent by the experimental subjects.” _The Erroneous Assumption of Probable Agreement_